Becoming a more sustainable organisation is a team effort. To fully manage your ESG risks and opportunities, you need everyone on-board and working together towards common goals. But what happens when your organisation is lacking authority or awareness from the very top?
The truth is this might be exactly what’s holding your efforts back. A recent study found that 40% of boards cite their inability to execute ESG policies as one of the main factors slowing their progress. Executive directors and board members face increasing pressure to steer their company in the right direction. Yet there remains a sizable lack of knowledge and confidence about how to ensure these key policies succeed.
So what can be done? A lot of this will come down to better oversight. Board members need to have better access to key ESG insights in order to make a difference. And no matter your industry, we’ve got some guidance on how to improve ESG oversight from the top-down.
Ingrain ESG into the organisation’s DNA
ESG strategies can affect operating profits by as much as 60%. So why are they often siloed off from wider company strategies and performance? By integrating ESG risks and opportunities into wider company strategies, you ensure these critical issues aren’t siloed off.
It encourages everyone across your organisation to take them as seriously as they would finances or operational performance.
Make an effort to open discussions about how ESG issues impact the wider company, customers, staff, and stakeholders. What specific environmental or social issues matter to them? Ingraining ESG performance in your organisation helps set the tone for sustainable, long-term growth and progress on key environmental, social, and governance factors.
Simplify and streamline the data
Prioritising ESG performance can be an extra burden for board members. It means additional data and reports to scan through, and a lot of extra information to consider when making decisions. All of which is often piled on top of already stretched time and resources. So, naturally, the easier managing this data and information becomes, the better your ESG integration will go.
The more you can lean on technology to help board members oversee ESG performance, the better.
Having the right tools to simplify data capture, analysis, and reporting will help bring some method to the madness. They’ll take away any guesswork and time spent making sense of every bit of information. Instead, board members can get straight to the heart of the data and what it means in terms of your core ESG themes.
Expect the unexpected
Equally as important as preparing for the risks in front of you right now is preparing for any future ones. The past few years have shown us that challenges can come out of nowhere. Seemingly overnight. And it’s important for the board to consider any issues that could crop up unexpectedly.
In a world that’s constantly changing, you can’t afford to react slowly. It’s important for senior leadership to take responsibility for any future risks seriously from the get-go. Where possible, they should be using technology and data to visualise emerging issues over time, improve real-time decision-making, and to support a more proactive approach.
Climate change, COVID, deepening inequalities across the globe, a cost-of-living crisis; they’re all having an impact. But board knowledge and confidence surrounding ESG factors still isn’t there yet. To keep pushing forward, companies will need better oversight and simplified management of all ESG-related matters.
Impact makes oversight of all ESG, social value, and sustainability issues a breeze. With robust and reliable data capture, measurement, and reporting, we put the entire process on autopilot. To find out more, schedule a demo or get in touch with the team on 0161 532 4752.